Kusum Choppra: Five novels old:
the forthcoming ALTITUDINUS: secrets, seekers, sinners that will be India's first 10 author collaborative novel,
SILVER DREAMS, India’s first romance for the elderly,
NIRBHAYA & OTHERS WHO DARED that offered hope to women for relief by thinking out of the box,
MASTANI, freeing her from the Brahmin myths of a dancing girl, and
BEYOND DIAMOND RINGS on Sindhi women's post Partition evolution.
Plus a lifetime of writing eBooks, book edits, translations, a History column, a Family Tree, blogs and newspaper stories – all milestones of my writing life.
For almost three decades, newspaper stories, both mundane and pathbreaking, appeared regularly in Rajasthan Patrika, The Week, Maharashtra Times, ocassionally Hindustan Times, Sakal, Deccan Herald, Current, Freedom First and www.boloji.com -- political, social and socio-economic.
Then I crash landed into creative writing, starting with short stories, then longer ones, and finally novels.
Now it is time for curating all that mental tumult into fiction bites that raise issues, personal and public, social and cultural, using empathy, logic, history and language skills to study and write fiction.
I often explore the internal confusion and conversations women have to know what is going around them, that Ismat Chugtai did; for tilting with patriarchal windmills remains a hobby. A woman’s point of view, empathy in examining issues logically and verbal emoting characterize my writing, I am told.
Obviously all those journalistic skills and practice, plus other interests offer their palette of hues and experiences that populate the writing of path breaking books, that carve out new territory each time – whether it concerns the elderly, the stalked and the gang-raped, an abused Princess or the refugees-turned-entrepreneurs who rule in world markets.
In the latest, a collaborative work is an experiment in bringing ten creative minds to work together to produce a single work, a romantic thriller with intriguing subplots.
What makes me a gypsy author, so to speak? Refusing to abide by genre or subject? I have not been able to pinpoint, except that a roving mind is fertile ground for imagining the lives of people. And there has been a lifetime of movement and opportunities to observe to draw from – starting from my birth in Singapore, childhood in Jakarta, Indonesia, return to India as a teenager, and of course, the nomadism of journalism.
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